• SAP’s CDP can handle multiple scenarios such as commerce, service, support and supply-chain management and offer a personalised experience.
• Enterprise software giant had acquired Qualtrics, Coresystems, Recast.AI, Callidus Software, Gigya and Abakus to ramp up its CX portfolio in recent years.

Dubai: Covid-19 has forced big software players to bring innovations into its customer data platform (CDP) to support B2B and B2C marketers to personalise customer interactions and enhance the customer experience.

The changing face of the digital commerce space led prominent players such as Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and Oracle to capitalise on the new opportunity of personalised customer experience in the last few months.

SAP had acquired Qualtrics, Coresystems, Recast.AI, Callidus Software, Abakus and Gigya to ramp up its CX portfolio in recent years.

Now, SAP has planned to go beyond marketing by adding rich context to commerce, sales and service experiences to its CDP.

“SAP can now connect the experience on the front office to all of the functions in the company. Based on the acquisition of Emarsys, we can also personalise the experiences. We can also make sure that the personalised experience in service and support in the supply chains also,” Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, said.

SAP has agreed to acquire Emarsys, a leading omnichannel customer engagement platform provider, this month to deliver hyperpersonalised, omnichannel engagements in real-time in a bid to help organisations ensure every engagement is relevant and impactful.

It is all about customers

“This is something that only SAP can do but we can do it as a team and that is why we are far more than a transactional CX vendor. It is really about customer experience,” Klein said.

SAP is highly committed to CX, he said, but “we now also invite the ecosystem to come and reach our solutions in the apps store and seamlessly integrate with the data model”

“We are far more than a transactional CRM vendor. It’s really about customer experience. I don’t think you will find it in other platforms,” he added.

An industry expert said that the importance of customer data has grown due to remote mode in commerce and take the data that exists in silos to power their business.

Paula Hansen, Chief Revenue Officer, SAP CX, said that customers have come to trust SAP for its scale and agility and which is important right now, especially during the pandemic.

“Our customers are making very dramatic pivots with consumers moving online and sales and services model being remote,” she said.

What a CDP does it brings everything together, so that the experience the consumer has at the point of interaction, whether it is commerce or a B2B scenario, it is highly personalised and highly interactive and all the data is there, Bob Stutz, President, SAP CX, said.

Investing over $1b

“I don’t think that there is any other company that takes care of the customer data every seriously. Companies collect data using different methods such as online browsing data, third-party CRM data, second-party CRM data, and it is pretty much all over the place. With our CDP, we can tie in with the one data model in our cloud platform and utilise the data in real-time,” he said.

SAP’s CDP is powered by identity management platform Gigya which it acquired in 2017 for $350 million.

 “We did not invent CDP, but SAP opens the concept to a new world of opportunities. SAP Customer Data Platform can deliver personalised experiences that nurture anonymous users into known, loyal customers using the customer’s preferred channels, unifying vast amounts of front-office, back-office and experience data as only SAP can,” Stutz said.

Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE for SAP Product Engineering, said that SAP will invest more than $1 billion into the localisation of its solutions over the next five years.

“SAP made more than 80 tweaks to its systems to accommodate local legal changes since the pandemic and there is a big need for it,” he said.